In his new book, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution, Wood insists that Beard still “casts a long shadow.” The same could be said of Wood, who has been an authority on this subject for almost as long as the fifty-six years that elapsed between Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913) and the publication of Wood’s first book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, in 1969. That study won acclaim for highlighting the intellectual and practical dilemmas of republicanism and for seeming to split the difference between celebration and criticism of the founders. Wood argued that, ironically, the course of the 1780s led toward a Madisonian “science of politics” that sought to bury economic conflict in schemes of federalism and representation, and did it so successfully that it created an American political tradition that couldn’t deal honestly with class or money.
In this, the young Wood performed a scholarly triple axel. At great length and sophistication, he had offered something to those inclined to celebrate the Constitution, those who criticized it, and those looking for some way between. The republic, simply put, was moderate yet innovative, advanced yet caught up in self-deception. Expecting the founders to have dealt with something as modern as race relations, however—as Lynd, New Left–affiliated historian and activist, was doing in the late 1960s in essays that laid out precisely where the Progressive historians had failed—was “anachronistic.” Thanks to his outspoken antiwar activism, Lynd lost his job at Yale. For his part, Wood got tenure at Brown, and after winning a Pulitzer for his second book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), he became known for complaining publicly about his left-leaning and multiculturalist colleagues and for the plaudits he received from Newt Gingrich, who distributed the book to rookie House members. That wouldn’t have been so notable or memorable had it not been part of what New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, in a lengthy new response to the controversy over the 1619 Project, rightly describes as an earlier iteration of today’s outrage—one that targeted the first set of national guidelines for teaching U.S. history and was cooked up just in time for 1994’s midterm elections.
Wood laid a foundation for a distinctive—we might say strategically sophisticated—kind of “founders” history, one that keeps a quiet distance from uncritical flag-waving by emphasizing at every turn how different the eighteenth century was yet also embraces patriotism by insisting that everything good about the United States still somehow emanates from the founding, even if sometimes ironically and unintentionally. Criticisms from the left—by neo-progressives or multiculturalists who would add other groups to the pantheon of founders, or would emphasize or even dwell at all on the antiquated, racist, inegalitarian aspects of what the founders created—have been mocked by Wood, in prefaces and footnotes and occasional book reviews, as misguided, “presentist” Beardian holdovers. That’s the language he uses when he is being polite. On other occasions, Wood descends into explicit red-baiting, as in his reviews of The Unknown American Revolution (2005), the career-summing work of the late Gary B. Nash that Wood tars as “locked into . . . Marxian categories,” and Robin Einhorn’s American Taxation, American Slavery (2006), a brilliant and meticulous excavation of tax policy’s links to the peculiar institution. By losing focus on “revolutionary characters” and their leadership, Wood has charged, these historians are doing politics, not history. How he has chosen to summarize his life’s work in his latest book tells us a lot about the current debate over the Constitution and where the current threat to his would-be vital center—his conviction that in the United States “power and liberty” have flown evenly and together—comes from: the claim that racial oppression has been a primary and continuous force in U.S. history, one reinforced, rather than mitigated, by the founders’ Constitution.